


The Prayer

by sparky955



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Down the Chimney Affair, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:25:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparky955/pseuds/sparky955
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, to go forward you need to remember the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prayer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hils](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hils/gifts).



> Prompt was Illya/Napoleon, hurt/comfort, romance, fever, pining, sharing a bed.

Nighttime is the worst.

Even when we're on assignment, even if I can't touch him, I can still hear him breathe at night. I can still smell him. And when we’ve been granted down time, to hold him in bed and feel the warmth of him, well, Napoleon says I’m getting old, but merely to be in bed with him, safe and together, is somehow more emotionally satisfying than sex. Sometimes.

So, it’s nighttime again, and I can’t hold him. All I can do is stand outside his isolation room and look through the window and listen over the speaker to the hiss and click of the ventilator breathing for him.

My world is in there, dying. I don’t discount the five other agents in similar rooms in Medical also in danger of losing their own battles for survival. Their lives are equally important, but his life gives _me_ life.

I can hear him saying, “The only thing that would have happened if you had been there, IK, is that you would be sick now, too.” Possibly. But my presence would have changed the timing of the event and just a small change might have averted the contamination.

I am beginning to believe that we need to kill every ranking member of THRUSH. Or at least each one who has higher cortical functioning than their basic goons. Telling myself that we’re supposed to be fighting, as those who did with King Arthur, on the side of right and that might does not make right is becoming more difficult to adhere to. I mean, money is one thing. Hell, it seems like every adult male over the age of thirteen in this country wants to accumulate money. But, THRUSH keeps working to hurt people, to eliminate those they consider undesirable. And, guns and explosive devices don’t appear to be satisfying their bloodlust and greed any longer.

They knew the team was coming, they had to have. Waverly has turned HQ inside out looking for a mole and still can’t find one, but they had to have had warning that we were sending a squad. Intel had detected chatter about what was supposed to be THRUSH’s latest and self-described greatest bacteria designed for the contamination of drinking water. The chatter continued that the test target was to be “the crux of the fools who follow The Baptist”. While Waverly and the Council labored to convince The Holy See to permit our security forces to monitor and protect them, Napoleon led a small team into the known satrap laboratory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

THRUSH may allege to not hold to Judeo-Christian tenets, but obviously someone had read their Bible.

I've been briefed that it was a speedy search and seizure of the lab, considering that all of the THRUSH inside were dead. From the second that Napoleon and his team entered the building, they were contaminated by the sprinkler system that had been activated some time before their unauthorized entry. He called Waverly for a Level Zero extraction, indicating that he and his team had been exposed to an unknown, likely hazardous, fluid and required infectious evac from the lab. By the time that the mid-Atlantic hazmat unit reached them, they were all unresponsive and barely breathing. They were intubated on the scene and flown directly to the Level Zero medical unit.

When I reached the unit and convinced Security that I was most assuredly entering, almost twenty-four hours had passed from the event, as it was being called. Napoleon and I had discussed when becoming lovers that we had to make every moment together count double because we knew that each day could end with one or both of our deaths. Looking at him, with my protective gear and a six inch thick window separating us, all I could think was, “Fight, Napoleon. Fight for me, fight for yourself, fight for _us_.”

He, all of our people, have now been in critical condition for five days. The best that can be said is that each of them is holding their own. Barely. But, prolonged ventilation very quickly can lead to pneumonia because there is no machine that can adequately reproduce the natural mechanism of one’s breathing. The increasing risk of pneumonia combined with the irritating properties of that water-born bacilli that rained down from the sprinkler system did not bode well for any of them over the long haul. So far, none of the intravenous antibiotics that have been tried have been effective at all in fighting the infection and restoring their normal lung function.

I’ve protected Napoleon from everything THRUSH has thrown at us, until now. I know how to break bones in silence and can blow up any structure and can shoot with deadly accuracy, but I can’t break or explode or shoot the organism that is taking my partner away from me.

“Mr. Kuryakin? Mr. Kuryakin? Illya?”

From the fog of my incandescent sorrow, I vaguely heard my name called. Looking up and around, I saw Mr. Waverly standing next to me. “I’m sorry, sir. Were you needing something?” And is my mind finally failing me or did the old man just call me Illya?

“An investigational antibiotic is on its way to us from the CDC. It hasn’t received FDA clearance for human trials, but the medical team and I believe that it’s the best available option of recovery for our team.”

I was having difficulty comprehending Mr. Waverly’s words. The combination of little sleep, little food, and little hope was taking its toll on my faculties. The words experimental, antibiotic, FDA and clearance did register for me, however.

“Sir. If the drug is not approved for human trials, how is it that it's being given to us?”

“Well”, Mr. Waverly harrumphed, “It appears I will being spending the Christmas holiday mending fences, as it were. Miss Dancer and Mr. Slate, shall we say, appropriated the drug from the CDC without it being offered to us for use.”

“Sir?” Was he saying what I think he was saying?

“It might go a long ways toward restoring interagency harmony if, after Mr. Solo has recovered, you would assist the CDC in developing a improved security system. Miss Dancer and Mr. Slate seem to have destroyed it quite thoroughly in their haste to obtain the antibiotic.” Patting my shoulder as he turned to leave the unit, Mr. Waverly smiled and said, “Have faith, Mr. Kuryakin. I don’t believe there is any chemical on Earth that could be stronger than your partner wanting to remain at your side.” Pausing, he added, “If you want to express your gratitude to Miss Dancer and Mr. Slate, you can contact them at Survival School. I thought it advantageous that neither of them be easily available for, ahem, extemporaneous interagency debriefing for the foreseeable future.”

As Mr. Waverly left the unit, a group of physicians rushed past me to enter Isolation. Dr. Reilly, one of them that Napoleon and I knew socially, locked eyes with me and said, “It’s called Nalidixic Acid and this is our last Hail Mary pass so that partner of yours better be as tough as he says he is.”

Watching the physicians add a syringe of the medication to each patient’s intravenous bottle, I saw the milky whiteness mix with the clear glucose solution. Hail Mary. Last Hail Mary. _Napoleon_. Unbidden, a memory of my grandmother’s voice came to me.

_Vo imya Ottsa, i Syna, i Svyatogo Dukha. Amin'. Gospod' Iisus Khristos, Syn Bozhiy, radi molitv Prechistyya Tvoyeya Materi i vsekh svyatykh, pomiluy nas. Amin'._  
_Svyatyy Bozhe, Svyatyy Krepkiy, Svyatyy Bessmertnyy, pomiluy nas. Slava Ottsu, i Synu, i Svyatomu Dukhu, i nyne i prisno, i vo veki vekov. Amin'. , - Presvyataya Troitsa pomiliy nas._  
_Promoknite, no nashi grekhi. Vladyko, prosti bezzakoniya nashi. Svyatyy, poseti i istseli nemoshchi nasha, imene Tvoyego radi._

An hour passed. Two. Three. I had been standing at the isolation window so long that my feet were numb, but I barely noticed that. Napoleon's face was all I could see. It was if I had tunnel vision;my surroundings had faded and my entire consciousness was centered on Napoleon. Napoleon. Napoleon who had his eyes open.  _His eyes open._

Turning toward me at the window, Dr. Reilly gave a thumbs up sign. 

_Well, my love, it would seem that you **are** as tough as you say you are._

*******  
I must really love that blond _ublyudok_ because I can’t think of any other reason I would be sitting on my couch in my own apartment on Christmas Day while leaning over a steaming pot of fifteen herbs mixed in garlic water with a blanket over my head to breathe in the stench.

And, there goes the phone. Again. Will he allow me to speak with any of our friends and coworkers calling to wish me a healthy Christmas? Nyet. Every time I try to come up for a quick breath of non-garlic air I get the patented Kuryakin glare with a wordless gesture to get my sorry head back under the blanket and breathe deep.

He thought I was napping earlier, but I heard him talking with April, telling her how he tapped all of his contacts in Little Russia to help him locate the herbs he needed before I came home. His grandmother’s recipe, he said, legendary for healing lungs weakened by consumption.

Hey, if it makes him happy. I know I look bad, but he looks like the one who came close to walking into the valley of death. If this will get that haunted look out of his eyes, I’ll sit here and steam until I smell like a vampire’s worst nightmare.

“IK, tell April I love her. And, could I take a five minute steaming break to pee?” He watches me stand up like he was watching a bomb tick down. He says goodbye to April, hangs up the phone, and walks behind me to the bathroom. When he tries to stand next to me at the toilet, I have to say, “Wither thou goest, partner mine, ends with potty training. I promise, one quick piss and I’m back to my private herbal garlic sauna.”

At least that puts a small smile on his much too pale face.

Urinary relief accomplished, I remain a man of my word and trudge back to the couch. And, just in time, too, to see that Babushka Kuryakin has brought a fresh steaming pot of Russian penicillin to my coffee table paradise. As I sit, I reach up for his wrist and pull him down next to me.

“Hi there, Florence Nightingale.”

“Hi yourself, Impatient Patient.”

“C’mere.” I tug on his arm until I get him to lie down on the couch with his head resting on my thigh. Under the blanket, of course. Don’t want my wolfhound to begin howling. Again. “Not that I don’t relish time alone spent with you, but how much longer am I going to have to keep inhaling Grandmama’s wonder potion?”. I begin stroking his head, enjoying both the softness of his hair between my fingers and the gradual lessening of the muscular tension in his body.

“You’ve been home three days. You need four more days of treatment.”

“Illya, I’m going to look like a cross between a steamed dumpling and a soggy piece of stripped off wallpaper if I keep this up for four more days.”

“Do you want to pass medical for field re-certification? The infection weakened your lungs. The Nalidixic Acid eradicated the infection, but that’s all it did. THIS will return normal lung function to you.”

“And prevent me from enjoying garlic bread for the rest of my life. Okay, okay, settle down, I’ll do it. Just stay here with me, okay?”

Temporarily pacified, Illya slides back a bit toward me on the couch to bring his head to rest against my abdomen. I feel him breathe deeply, hold it for a few seconds, then release it. Then I feel his chin quiver every so slightly. I abandon stroking his head to wrap my arm around his shoulder.

“It’s okay now, love. It’s all over. I’m here, I’m all better and I’m not going any place. You can stand down now. I’m here. It’s time for you to let it go.”

“Napoleon?”

“Hmmm?”

“I know I could go on without you, but I really don’t want to so would you mind not strolling into any toxic sprinkler systems for a while.”

“I will make that a top priority, IK.”

“Napoleon?”

“Yes, my little garlic Tsar?”

“I prayed.”

“I know, sweetheart. I did, too.”

“I love you.”

“And, I love you too. I will for all of my life. So, now, how about a nice long Christmas morning –“

“Napoleon !!!!!”

“Nap, Agent Sex Maniac. Nap.”. Throwing off my garlic tent, I nudge him off my lap so I can stand up. Reaching down to take his hand, I smile, “Come on, partner. Let’s go have some visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. Of course, they’’ll probably smell like garlic.”

**Author's Note:**

> Illya's prayer:  
> In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for the sake of the prayers of Thy most pure Mother and all the saints, have mercy on us. Amen.
> 
> Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. Glory to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and ever and ever. Amen.
> 
> Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us.
> 
> Holy Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities, for Thy name. Amen.


End file.
